Word: icbms
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...Safeguard system has four key elements. PAR (perimeter acquisition radar) detects an enemy ICBM at long range some time after it has been launched, calculates its path, and then passes the missile track along to the less powerful but much more complex MSR (missile site radar). MSR then directs two types of ABMs against the incoming warheads. The long-range Spartan is designed to make an intercept above the atmosphere, at altitudes between 200 and 400 mi. The smaller Sprint would seek out and destroy warheads that penetrated the Spartan screen by intercepting them within 40 miles of the target...
Intelligence reports have shown that the SS-9's reentry vehicles splashed down in a pattern. That design, when superimposed on a map of U.S. missile sites, was found to coincide with the distribution of ICBM silos. "There isn't any question," Nixon said, "that it is a multiple weapon, and its footprints indicate that it just happens to fall in somewhat the precise area in which our Minuteman silos are located...
...outcome. "This frustration is why people are hitting out at the nearest hitching post, much as the students strike at the universities when that is really not what they're mad at." The staggering cost of modern armament is a further cause of discontent, Wheeler says. "An ICBM is at least a million dollars a throw; a nuclear carrier, half a billion, an ABM system, $7 billion. And it is all blamed on the military, because at first glance our weapons and our uniforms are easily identified...
...told members of two Senate committees that the Soviet Union has gone ahead to install hundreds of giant S59 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each of which can deliver up to 25-megaton hydrogen warheads. (The U.S. Minuteman ICBM carries a relatively modest one-megaton punch.) The SS-9, said Laird, is far too potent a weapon for the mere destruction of cities: since the Soviets must have it in their inventory for the purpose of knocking out a tougher target, the U.S. ICBMs in their silos...
...people against the kind of nuclear attack which Communist China is likely to be able to mount within the decade." It was a difficult line of reasoning to maintain, since the Chinese, until at least the mid-1970s, will not have the sophisticated weaponry to zero in on U.S. ICBM sites. They would be readier for the less precise task of attacking U.S. cities, which will not be defended by the Safeguard system...